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While LLVM's Clang compiler is predominantly used on Linux, OS X, and BSD systems, the Microsoft Windows support has been a focus over the past several months and is reaching an improved state for building native Windows programs with Visual C++ compatibility.

While adoption of the Linux x32 ABI hasn't really taken off with most developers and end-users doing just fine with x86_64-compiled software, Intel is trying to get things back on track for supporting x32 by LLVM and Clang.

With LLVM developers already having lots of C++1y / C++14 support implemented, they have begun working on "highly experimental" support for C++1z -- the next major revision to the C++ programming language anticipated for release in 2017.

GCC 4.9 was released at the end of April so this weekend I ran some fresh compiler benchmarks of the latest GCC 4.10 compiler snapshot to see if there's been any performance improvements thus far in the 4.10 development cycle, although GCC 4.10 will not be released until 2015.

At Apple's recent WWDC event besides announcing a new 3D graphics API, Apple also announced Swift, a new programming. However, Apple developers don't yet know -- or can't admit -- whether Swift will ultimately be open-source or made to be cross-platform.

PathScale, the company behind the EKOPath compiler and other compiler technologies for both CPUs and GPGPU solutions, is looking to hire one or two kernel developers to work on improving the open-source AMD Linux graphics drivers... Particularly, to improve the GPGPU/OpenCL compute support in the driver, improve the Hawaii GPU and APU support, and potential optimizations for GPUs with 4GB+ of video memory.

Back in March Apple open-sourced their ARM 64-bit LLVM back-end (dubbed ARM64) many months after other ARM vendors had already developed a competing 64-bit ARM back-end (dubbed "AArch64" as ARM's official name for architecture). Since Apple opened up their back-end, Apple and outside LLVM developers have been working to converge the competing 64-bit ARM back-ends into a single 64-bit ARM target. That work is now complete.

One of LLVM's Clang compiler benefits that has long been trumpeted has been about its speedy compiler times in comparison to GCC. The latest results of using Clang with Qt Creator further reinforce the insanely fast compile times.

Back in March Apple open-sourced their 64-bit LLVM compiler back-end (ARM64) but by the time that was done there was already a 64-bit ARM back-end (AArch64) present within mainline LLVM that was created by other ARM stakeholders. For the past several weeks, all of the LLVM developers have been working on converting towards a single LLVM 64-bit ARM back-end. In the days ahead, that work should be complete.

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